Farrar, Straus and Giroux -- hcNew York -- ©2003 -- 180pp
ISBN: 0-374-17399-0
Stories.
"Dream of a Clean Slate"
"Elephant Feelings"
The Judgment of Psycho"
"The Faces of Joan of Arc"
"Capucine"
"Glenn Gould in Six Parts"
"Good World"
"Crimes at Midnight"
"Narrow Road"
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I love short fiction and was eager to read this collection, despite being less than enthused by Haskell's OUT OF MY SKIN. But what I read was a collection of stories that all seemed the same to me. Each story associating two dis-similar entities. Each story about what something is NOT (hmmm...a pattern here? "NOT Jackson Pollack" and his OUT OF MY SKIN could have been titled "I Am Not Steve Martin"). And sadly, his writing style struck me as dull.
As some of the other reviewers here mention, you do need to be in the right frame of mind for this style of book, but I'm not sure what that frame of mind is. Lost? Confused? And then you can nod appreciably at recognizing another lost soul?
I love looking for and finding an author that I can enjoy and who isn't someone that you will find on the NYT Bestsellers list. (For instance, my discovery of Paul Watkins still strikes me as an enjoyable 'find'.) But Haskell is not someone that I will continue to read.
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